Diego Yu, President of Huawei Cloud Core Network Strategy & Business Development Department, talks about the current status of telco cloud deployment, the edge computing applications it powers, and what telcos need to do to ensure interoperability.
The Layer123 Network Transformation Awards came together for the fifth time to give some credit to the people, teams and companies driving outstanding achievements in network building and keeping people connected. There were 16 winners in total – and we will profile some of the winners here, starting with a testbed controller from ETSI to help unleash the power of 6G.
The Cloud Native – Telco Enhancement roundtable was held for the first time within the Layer123 World Congress, with leading telcos and vendors gathering to discuss NFV and Telco Cloud.
2022 marks the 10th anniversary of the floating of the idea of network function virtualisation, with software-defined networking already gathering steam by this point.
Layer123 World Congress 2022 speaker Daniel Bar-Lev talks about what we mean by on-demand supply chains, and why blockchain could remove some of the friction in the telco supply chain.
A range of companies collected awards for outstanding contributions to the progress of network automation at this year’s Network Automation Awards – held as part of the Layer123 Reunion Network Automation Congress.
Dr. Ye Ouyang, CTO & SVP of AsiaInfo Technologies, discusses how to leverage artificial intelligence to build autonomous networks, with a particular focus on the Asia-Pacific area, including case studies related to energy saving for 5G networks, automated network slicing provision, and AIOps for fault management.
Smart data platform edge services – essentially an op-premises IaaS for edge workloads – offers a cloud-managed appliance for AI and machine learning scenarios at the network edge. Its use of concepts such as zero-touch provisioning, centralised site management, virtualised infrastructure and remote app distribution offers several benefits to network owners, including latency as low as >10ms, autonomous control, bandwidth saving and privacy protection.
As the ETSI ZSM Working Group delivers a workshop at the Layer123 Reunion Congress in Madrid, we caught up with ISG ZSM Vice Chair Nurit Sprecher to discuss the current situation with zero-touch automation and intent-based networking.
5G is arguably the first network specification that is primarily designed for enterprises rather than consumers. This means that it is not just about speed and bandwidth – ultra-reliable low latency communication is a vital feature of 5G connectivity, and arguably what really matters is 5G is to become ubiquitous across industrial use cases.
Vinay Dhar from Mavenir discusses how bespoke private networks can power next-generation industrial capability. With market trends such as spectrum democratisation, corporate digital transformation and a revolution in distributed and edge computing driving growth in private networks, operators have a great opportunity to penetrate brand new markets.See all Layer123 online talks
Anuradha Udunawara from Sri Lanka Telecom gives a reality check for SDN and NFV - discussing the history and progress of the two initiatives so far, their current status, and where their relevance lies for network owners going forward.
Over the next five years, Telefonica is planning a major overhaul of its core operation, with a brand new cloud-native architecture to address the needs of all the future services that will need to be provided via 5G. It is a big job - legacy services for 2G upwards will also be migrated to this new architecture - but once it is finished it will enable high distribution of data traffic, network slicing, and a culture of fast innovation and easy operation.
With a huge number of POPs across Argentina – an enormous and geographically diverse country- Telecom Argentina is well positioned to grow its market share by offering next-gen connectivity services to customers. For this to happen, however, network transformation and restructuring was required, with automation a big part of it, as Cloud Architect Miguel Masache told Layer123. How did they do it? By transforming in two ways: technologically and organisationally.
As networks move to the cloud and to the edge, become more automated, and expand to handle more traffic, the sheer amount of data needed to ensure all this runs smoothly is growing enormously. This is putting existing processing power and algorithms used by network operators under serious strain. Not only that, the security required to protect networks from a menacing array of threats becomes a tougher ask each quarter. Could quantum computing solve both these problems? And is it a realistic, medium-term solution, or a hype train that is too far up the track?
Pascal Menezes, CTO of MEF, made an appearance at the Edge Computing & Disaggregated Networking track of the 2021 Layer123 World Congress to discuss the role edge computing and network transformation can play in what is an enormous digital economy. With network transformation moving beyond classic IT deployments to include new use cases from AI to warehousing overhauls, these workflows require an end-to-end frictionless experience from device to surface - which raises the question of how can connectivity providers provide this kind of experience?
OSS transformation is a vital part of any successful network automation drive, and it touches many aspects of network management - including transport. With this in mind Lloyd Mphalele, General Transport and OSS Tools Manager at South African operator MTN, discusses some of their experiences in transforming OSS and some of the approaches that are being taken.
In advance of the Layer123 Europe Congress, leading practitioners championing TIP’s Open RAN initiative and those united within the O-RAN Alliance came together to discuss all things RAN.
In a competitive landscape for connectivity services, cloud proviedrs are attempting to solve to large problems at the same time - how to increase network and operational agility, and how to save costs. This will involve not just new techologies, but operational transformation as well, in which cloudification of business and operational support services will play a big role. With this in mind, Dave Milham, Chief Architect at TM Forum, came to the Layer123 World Congress to discuss the preliminary work done by his organisation on cloudifying BSS and OSS.
Erik Hanselman, Principal Analyst at 451 Research, discusses what operators need to do in order to take full advantage of operations automation - looking their journey and the mindset that can help move them forward.
Quantum computing has the potential to revolutionise the technological world - but what are its applications to telecommunications? With the operator having dabbled in quantum trials since 2007, Telefonica has been operating the MadQCI testbed since 2018 with the aim of integrating quantum capability into its existing SDN/NFV infrastructure. Diego Lopez discusses the progress made so far and what to expect in the coming year.
Roy Chua, Founder and Principal of AvidThink, gives his traditional roundup of what happened in the telco and network transformation space in 2021 and what can be expected in the coming year.
Vara Prasad Talari and Ashutosh Tulsi from AWS Telecom talk about how hybrid cloud can be used to enhance both automation and orchestration within telco workloads.
Open networking initiatives are becoming a commercial reality across the network with SDN, Open RAN and others – and now it is the turn of fixed access to benefit from control-data separation with Open BNG initiatives.
Ahead of his keynote presentation at the Layer123 World Congress, we caught up with BT’s Digital OSS Director Ravi Ramachandran for some background on how BT is reimagining its OSS provision.
When it comes to network automation, customer-facing, front-end innovations have taken the focus of service providers. This is understandable, given the new connectivity demands and competition in the area. But delivering next-generation service is not possible without streamlining the operations process that lies behind it - in a recent poll of 50 CSPs, the largest group of respondents believe that automating service operations is critical to driving growth. In many operators, although much investment has been made in creating cloud-based networks, areas such as fulfilment processes, billing management and internal IT systems still operate according to manual, siloed processes. This is not a suitable foundation for the flexibility of service that innovations such as 5G require – and if the back end is not put into order, entire operations may well crumble.
With its 140 million+ population, industrial base, and position at the centre of many international routes, Russia is a telecommunications market with enormous potential. But the large distances between population centres and infrastructure challenges means that service providers must strive for maximum efficiency to provide a reliable service and keep costs under control.
The Layer123 World Congress - under various aliases – has now been around for a full decade. As we all know, internet years are more like dog years than anything else – so these 10 years have seen some scarcely believable changes in how networks operate and the services they allow the industry to provide, with the more or less successful Covid response a glowing testament to the work put in and the progress made in building a more flexible, more customisable, and better manageable telecoms infrastructure.
Network automation is an end-to-end process – so it touches almost every existing area of a telco’s operation. This means that organisational synergy must be running like clockwork for a network automation programme to succeed. In a preview of his talk on this subject at the Layer123 Network Automation Congress, Anuradha Udunuwara - Senior Enterprise Solutions Architect at Sri Lanka Telecom - talks about what telcos need to do to make sure their network automation programmes make a lasting difference.
